09/30/2025
AI
Enterprise
Doubling Down on Lightspeed’s Investment in Descope: The Next-Gen IAM Platform For Customers, Partners, and AI Agents

The identity and authentication space is entering a new phase of urgency. Fueled by the rise of AI agents, MCP servers, and machine-to-machine workflows, the way businesses secure their applications is changing dramatically. Every interaction between a human and a machine—or increasingly, between two machines—requires a trusted layer of identity and permissions. Without it, security gaps widen, user experiences break down, and businesses risk losing the trust of their customers.
It’s no surprise that the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) market, already worth $8.6B in 2021, is projected to nearly double to $17.6B by 2026. In a market this dynamic, we believe what’s needed is a developer-first solution that moves as quickly as the transformation itself.
Enter Descope, founded in 2022 by the team behind Demisto, the notable security orchestration platform acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $560M. The founding team has worked together for decades across companies like McAfee, Intel Security, and Palo Alto Networks, and they’ve already demonstrated they know how to create a new category in enterprise security.
We’re excited to share our investment in Descope’s seed extension round, led by GGV/Notable Capital with participation from Lightspeed and others. This new investment will fuel hiring across engineering and go-to-market, expand Descope’s agentic identity momentum, deepen integrations, and accelerate the company’s goal towards market leadership.
The Trusted Identity Layer
Descope’s mission is to simplify authentication, authorization, and identity management for developers. The platform offers:
- A full authentication and authorization stack with a wide range of authentication methods, RBAC and fine-grained authorization models, and the tools to enable phishing-resistant, risk-based MFA
- A low-code/no-code identity orchestration engine so developers and security teams can design and adjust user journeys without rewriting code
- Robust B2B / B2B2X IAM capabilities that help organizations easily adopt SSO, simplify SSO and SCIM setup, federate identities across multiple apps and identity providers, and delegate identity management to their tenant admins and users
- Agentic Identity Hub, a suite of capabilities that helps organizations build secure, scalable AI agents and MCP servers with identity infrastructure baked-in
Descope’s long-term vision is ambitious: to become the trusted layer for organizations to manage identity journeys for their customers, partners, and agentic AI / MCP systems.
Traction Since Our First Investment
In just over two years, Descope has established itself as one of the fastest-growing developer-first platforms in security:
- Over a thousand organizations in production, running the gamut from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises
- Hundreds of paying customers, including well-known names like Databricks, GoFundMe, GoodRx, Navan, and CARS24
- Continued revenue ramp, with ARR projected to triple this year, making Descope one of the fastest ramping companies in its category
This success is well-deserved. Since our initial investment in 2023, the team has continued to sharpen the product. They’ve expanded integrations, made the drag-and-drop interface even more intuitive with hundreds of templates, and added support for use cases like native mobile authentication and identity federation. Developer feedback has been consistent: Descope go-live times are 75-80% faster than incumbents like Auth0 and home-grown implementations, while also providing organizations the flexibility to modify identity journeys as their user and market needs evolve.
Looking Ahead
This is a pivotal moment for Descope. The company recently expanded its focus from powering consumer applications to enabling agentic identity–the authentication and authorization of AI agents and MCP servers that will continue gaining prominence in digital spaces. They’re building a strong developer community and advocacy network– having also announced an Advisory Board today with technology leaders from companies like Databricks, GoFundMe, MongoDB, and OpenWeb–and they’re moving with purpose on the path to becoming the no / low code identity platform of choice.
We believe this team is on the cusp of breakout growth, and we’re proud to continue backing Descope as they redefine what identity can be in a world of humans, machines, and now intelligent agents.
The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. The views expressed here are those of the individual Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. (“Lightspeed”) personnel and are not the views of Lightspeed or its affiliates; other market participants could take different views.
Unless otherwise indicated, the inclusion of any third-party firm and/or company names, brands and/or logos does not imply any affiliation with these firms or companies.
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